Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 14, 2024, 09:27:43 PMYeah. I bought the RPG because I wanted to give it a fair shot. Read the whole thing, understand it and maybe playtest. I also bought the GM screen with the pack in adventure. Oh, and the Autobot dice set. I still plan to get the Decepticon dice. Dice are hard (not impossible) to fuck up.
I haven't bought a thing since. They came out with a Decepticon sourcebook and an adventure that I know of. Not interested.

Well they screwed up the dice. Check the D4 out, then contact customer service for a replacement of it. I eventually got mine. They messed up on all of the custom dice in the first run. All 6 Power Rangers dice sets, the G.I. Joe dice, and the Autobot Dice Set. I got hit on all of them.

https://renegadegamestudios.com/replacement-d4

The Decepticon Dice Set was not messed up with the misprinted D4.

I own The Deception Directive. All the archetypes they have for characters are some kind of societal misanthrope. Again, very one note.

The best book in the line is The Enigma Of Combination. Where they not only detail all iterations of the combiner process, but the Headmaster/Targetmaster/Powermaster process. That one book is a bright spot in a line that was pretty disappointing out of the gate.

Quote from: Almost_Useless on May 14, 2024, 11:42:27 PM"Oh boy!  I can't wait to see how Greyhawk has been revised and updated for modern audiences."

'Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay!' - Kathleen Kennedy (probably)

Quote from: Almost_Useless on May 14, 2024, 11:42:27 PM"Oh boy!  I can't wait to see how Greyhawk has been revised and updated for modern audiences." -- Nobody, ever.

This was one of the first replies I saw when the news broke:

 "I love being mindful of the history D&D. A new vision of the Oerth of Greyhawk (and Blackmoor) for this century is awesome.

I am curious, what aspects of the legacy content they will mine and which they will tweak for sensibilities today."

So yes, someone, today.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 07:56:00 PMIf the market wants to destroy itself, then be my guest. I've done everything I could do.

I'm sure lore, or "background and conceits", can be used well, but after my experiences with the Vampire LARPers and Blizzard games I'm just exasperated with the entire concept. It's used badly more often than it's used well.

If I want to play a vampire mad scientist, then the Vampire LARPers would force me to play as a samosa clan (or whatever, I don't care to get the name right) that has a ton of other baggage that I'm not interested in. I have never appreciated D&D's division of races, backgrounds, classes, factions, etc. more than I have after experiencing that dumpster fire fandom.

If I want to play voracious space bugs, then my options don't look good. Tyranids are a faceless force of nature and don't have any utility as a storytelling tool beyond that because they can't have characters, dialogues, or proximate objectives. Also, I'm not spending a fortune on figurines to those assholes at GW. The zerg are a fucking joke, dumb animals under the control of a psychotic succubus with boyfriend/daddy issues. It's so obnoxious.

I am writing original settings with backstories (like that not!SST thing), because I am exasperated with this kinds of things but I still want to see them done well. I'm more interested in exploring themes and plots than I am expositing trivia, so I don't limit myself to only those settings.

On the other hand, I don't have as much motivation to write as I would like. Beyond general self-doubt in my writing ability, I don't get the impression that there's an audience.

I posted 10,000+ words of original fiction to one of those fiction writing sites a couple months ago. It currently sits at a paltry 70 views.

If it's not fanfiction why not go ahead and selfpublish it?

"Oh boy!  I can't wait to see how Greyhawk has been revised and updated for modern audiences." -- Nobody, ever.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 14, 2024, 08:17:17 PMYou do make a good point about the Book of Wonders, though it hadn't been written yet at the time of the setting (unless I'm very mistaken about that).

You're right, it's late 14th century so the book itself would be extant in baseline L&D, but not S&C. That said, many of the folkloric Jinn traditions in the book likely predate it by some time.For example, many of the spirits named as Jinn Kings in Kitab al-Bulhan appear in Daqa'iq al-Haqa'iq and Kitab al-Mawalid from around a century earlier.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 14, 2024, 08:17:17 PMAs to the magic items, I derived them from a variety of Arab, Chinese, Turkik, Indian, and steppe tribesman sources, but at this point I'll be damned if I can sort them out. Some of them are a lot more famous than others, and some had a lot more detail while in others I had to extrapolate and just fill in the blanks with my own ideas of exactly what they do.

Well damn. I was afraid of that as it's been so long. I held out hope though since it's nice to have an image of how some of the items fit into the legends of the surrounding cultures. Do the ones above that I tried to puzzle out at least seem accurate to you?

Quote from: Darrin Kelley on May 14, 2024, 06:34:05 PM

Quote from: RNGm on May 14, 2024, 11:00:18 AMWell, you certainly showed them (IDW) by repeatedly continuing to buy them despite how bad they were.  Companies will never learn a lesson unless their customers do first.  Knowing it was so bad so recently and that the RPG license was likely acquired a while back when they were still in control/the current thing, did you do some research on the RPG to see if it was more of the same before buying it?   It may sound like harsh words from a stranger online but I'm a fellow (former) fan of many properties that have been utterly ruined over the past decade by woke nonsense that will never be taken back and had to learn the same lesson myself.  Trust but verify doesn't work with the woke; it's more like verify and assume until proven otherwise.

It was impossible to know the contents before buying. They had no previews of the books. Renegade usually doesn't do previews. So you don't know until you have the books in hand.

Yeah. I bought the RPG because I wanted to give it a fair shot. Read the whole thing, understand it and maybe playtest. I also bought the GM screen with the pack in adventure. Oh, and the Autobot dice set. I still plan to get the Decepticon dice. Dice are hard (not impossible) to fuck up.
I haven't bought a thing since. They came out with a Decepticon sourcebook and an adventure that I know of. Not interested.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2024, 09:11:44 PMSo yeah. The good thing about Transformers (also a bad thing) is that there are so many different "canons" out there, you can pick and choose. I personally prefer a huge helping of the G1 Cartoon continuity, with a few tweaks to close up some of the setting plotholes, and a bit of cherry picking of good ideas from the other continuities.

How is that a bad thing? Numerous concepts now considered integral to the IP were introduced in reboots, like sparks, Primus, the primes, megatron's tragic backstory, etc.

My review of Wretched Country 2e, a much-improved Wild West setting from the Red Room! Plus, I talk a bit about what makes for a meaningful Wild West campaign.
#ttrpg #osr #dnd

Also this was released today, "Characters from the classic D&D cartoon get a makeover in this internal art from a chapter opener in the new Player's Handbook. Artist Credit: Dmitry Burmak"